Browsed byTag: vsan

vSAN 6.6 it’s 6th generation of the product and there are more than 20+ new features and enhancements in this release, such as:

Native encryption for data-at-rest

Compliance certifications

Resilient management independent of vCenter

Degraded Disk Handling v2.0 (DDHv2)

Smart repairs and enhanced rebalancing

Intelligent rebuilds using partial repairs

Certified file service & data protection solutions

Stretched clusters with local failure protection

Site affinity for stretched clusters

1-click witness change for Stretched Cluster

vSAN Management Pack for vRealize

Enhanced vSAN SDK and PowerCLI

Simple networking with Unicast

vSAN Cloud Analytics with real-time support notification and recommendations

vSAN Config Assist with 1-click hardware lifecycle management

Extended vSAN Health Services

vSAN Easy Install with 1-click fixes

Up to 50% greater IOPS for all-flash with optimized checksum and dedupe

Support for new next-gen workloads

vSAN for Photon in Photon Platform 1.1

Day 0 support for latest flash technologies

Expanded caching tier choice

Docker Volume Driver 1.1

… ok now lets review main enhancements:

vSAN 6.6 introduces the industry’s first native HCI security solution. vSAN will now offer data-at-rest encryption that is completely hardware-agnostic. No more concern about someone walking off with a drive or breaking in to a less-secure, edge IT location and stealing hardware. Encryption is applied at the cluster level, and any data written to a vSAN storage device, both at the cache layer and persistent layer can now be fully encrypted. And vSAN 6.6 supports 2-factor authentication, including SecurID and CAC.

Certified file services and data protection solutions are available from 3rd party partners in the VMware Ready for vSAN Program to enable customers to extend and complement their vSAN environment with proven, industry-leading solutions. These solutions provide customers with detailed guidance on how to complement vSAN. (EMC NetWorker is avaialble today with new solutions coming on soon)

vSAN stretched cluster was released in Q3’15 to provide an Active-Active solution. vSAN 6.6 adds a major new capability that will deliver a highly-available stretched cluster that addresses the highest resiliency requirements of data centers. vSAN 6.6 adds support for local failure protection that can provide resiliency against both site failures and local component failures.

PowerCLI Updates: Full featured vSAN PowerCLI cmdlets enable full automation that includes all the latest features. SDK/API updates also enable enterprise-class automation that brings cloud management flexibility to storage by supporting REST APIs.

VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for vSAN released recently, provides customers with native integration for simplified management and monitoring. The vSAN management pack is specifically designed to accelerate time to production with vSAN, optimize application performance for workloads running on vSAN and provide unified management for the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC). It provides additional options for monitoring, managing and troubleshooting vSAN along with the end-to-end infrastructure solutions.

Finally, vSAN 6.6 is well suited for next-generation applications. Performance improvements, especially when combined with new flash technologies for write-intensive applications, enable vSAN to address more emerging applications like Big Data. The vSAN team has also tested and released numerous reference architectures for these types of solutions, including Big Data, Splunk and InterSystems Cache.

Virtual SAN provides the Storage Performance Proactive Tests which lets you to check parameters of your environment in an easy way. You just need few clicks to run a test.

Well, we can see a lot of tests from nested labs in the Internet, however there are not so many real examples.

I decided to share some results of such a real environment which consists 5 ESXi hosts. Each is equipped with 1x SSD Disk 1,92 TB and 5x HDD 4 TB.

It’s almost 10% of space reserved for cache on SSD. VMware claims that the minimum is 10% so it shouldn’t be so bad.

Since Virtual SAN 6.2 released with vSphere 6.0 Update 2, VMware makes the testing of performance much more easy. That’s possible thanks to Storage Performance Proactive Tests which lets you to check parameters of your environment in an easy way. They are available from Web Client, you just need few clicks to run a test. Perhaps those aren’t the most sophisticated whilst they are really easy to use.

To start some tests, simply move to Monitor>Virtual SAN>Proactive Tests tab on VSAN cluster level and click at run test button (green triangle).